Hierarchies are used to visually arrange items (e.g., names, values, objects, etc.) with respect to each other such that items may be represented as being above, below, or on the same level as one another. Within the hierarchy, items may be linked to one another vertically and diagonally. Hierarchies are a common way to classify or sort data for a particular purpose such as for generating analytical reports, understanding geographical relationships, depicting internal organizational structures, and the like. Hierarchies can be useful in many different industries such as finance, business partnerships, costs centers, materials management, and the like. Hierarchies provide the ability to dynamically analyze large volumes of information at various granularity levels enabling a user to drill down further into the information or roll up the information into a more condensed representation. By displaying data in an interactive hierarchical form, a user may perform a detailed analysis or a summarized analysis using the same hierarchy based on a user preference.
Managing how hierarchies are displayed and/or further processed and managing the underlying data can be complicated especially when attempting to combine hierarchies (e.g., a customer hierarchy and a geographical hierarchy) or attempting to generate multiple hierarchies (e.g., different views and/or arrangements) from the same data. For example, a sales department of a company may desire to arrange customer data in the view of a different hierarchy than a marketing department or distribution department of the same company. At present, it is difficult to merge data from multiple hierarchies into the same hierarchy because there is difficulty determining how the data is to be merged. Furthermore, while it may be possible to provide different hierarchical views of the same data, in order to maintain the underlying data requires the storage of a large amount of redundant data. It can also be difficult to keep all of the data up-to-date.
Throughout the drawings and the detailed description, unless otherwise described, the same drawing reference numerals will be understood to refer to the same elements, features, and structures. The relative size and depiction of these elements may be exaggerated or adjusted for clarity, illustration, and/or convenience.